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I’ve long recommended creating a bootable installer drive—on an external hard drive, thumb drive, or USB stick—for the version of macOS you’re running on your Mac. It’s great for installing the OS on multiple Macs, because you don’t have to download the ~6GB installer onto each computer, and it serves as a handy emergency disk if your Mac is experiencing problems. 1

Here’s this year’s version of my annual how-to guide. The procedure has changed slightly this year due to a change in Apple’s createinstallmedia tool.

What you need

To create a bootable Mojave installer drive, you just need the aforementioned installer and a Mac-formatted drive (a hard drive, solid-state drive [SSD], thumb drive, or USB stick) that’s big enough to hold the installer and all its data—an 8GB thumb drive is perfect.

The installer drive must be formatted as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume with a GUID Partition Table. Macworld has a nice tutorial that explains how to properly format the drive.

Your macOS user account must also have administrator privileges.

Important: When you download the Mojave installer from the Mac App Store, it will be saved to your main Applications folder (/Applications); it must be in that location for the procedure below to work. However, if you run the installer—say, to install the OS—from that location, the installer will delete itself after installation finishes. So if you plan to run the installer before making your bootable installer drive, first make a copy of the Installer in another folder or on another drive so you have a safe copy; before creating the bootable installer, move the copy back to the Applications folder. (If you’ve read this paragraph too late, and the installer has already deleted itself after an installation, you just need to re-download Mojave from the Mac App Store—via the Purchased tab—before you can make your bootable installer drive.)

The easiest way is createinstallmedia

Starting with Mavericks, hidden inside the OS X installer is a Unix program called createinstallmedia, provided by Apple specifically for creating a bootable installer drive. Using it requires the use of Terminal, but it works well, it’s official, and the procedure is easy enough: If you can copy and paste, you can do it.

The only real drawback to createinstallmedia is that it doesn’t work under OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard—it requires OS X 10.7 Lion or later. But I suspect that in 2018, pretty much everyone installing macOS 10.14 Mojave will have access to a Mac running 10.7 or later.

Using createinstallmedia in Terminal to create a Mojave installer drive.

The steps

Connect to your Mac a properly formatted 8GB (or larger) drive, and rename the drive Untitled. (The Terminal command I provide here assumes that the drive is named Untitled.) Also, make sure that the Mojave installer (or at least a copy of it), called Install macOS Mojave.app, is in its default location in your main Applications folder (/Applications).

Warning: This step will erase the destination drive or partition, so make sure that it doesn’t contain any valuable data. Paste the copied command into Terminal, making sure that no double dashes (--) were replaced by em dashes (—); press Return.

The Terminal window displays createinstallmedia’s progress as a textual representation of a progress bar: Erasing Disk: 0%… 10 percent…20 percent… and so on. You also see a list of the program’s tasks as they occur: Copying to disk…Making disk bootable…Copying boot files…. On a recent Mac with a fast destination drive, the procedure shouldn’t take longer than 5 minutes, though it can take as long as 20 or 30 minutes on an older Mac or with a very slow drive. The process is finished once you see Install media now available at /Volumes/Install macOS Mojave, as shown in the screenshot above. If you like, you can then rename the drive (in the Finder) from its default name of Install macOS Mojave.

Booting from the installer drive

You can boot any Mojave-compatible Mac from your new installer drive. First, connect the drive to your Mac. Then, if your Mac is already booted into macOS, choose the install drive in the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences and restart; or, if your Mac is currently shut down, hold down the Option key at startup and choose the install drive when macOS’s Startup Manager appears.

Once booted from your installer drive, you can perform any of the tasks available from the macOS installer’s special recovery and restore features. In fact, you’ll see the same macOS Utilities screen you get when you boot into macOS Recovery—but unlike with recovery mode, your bootable installer includes the entire installer.

A note about macOS updates

In the months and years ahead, Apple will release updates to macOS Mojave that provide security patches, bug fixes, and even new features. However, any Mojave installer drive you create will install the version of Mojave available at the time you downloaded the installer. This means that if you use a drive you create now to install Mojave on a Mac in six months, you’ll have to manually update that Mac with any Mojave updates released in the interim.

Unfortunately, you can’t easily update the installer drive so that it installs the latest version. If you want to create a bootable drive that installs the latest version Mojave directly, you’ll need to a download the latest version of the Mojave installer app from the Mac App Store, and then repeat the procedure above using the new installer app.

I think it’s a better emergency disk than macOS Recovery, because a bootable installer drive includes the full macOS installer, whereas macOS Recovery requires you to download ~6GB of installer data if you ever need to reinstall the OS. (And don’t forget that not all Macs have macOS Recovery.) ↩

[I’ve updated this guide to cover both macOS 10.13 High Sierra and macOS 10.12 Sierra. Also, a reminder: Apple has released a good number of major updates to both High Sierra and Sierra since their initial releases. Unfortunately, if you created an installer drive with an older version of the macOS installer, you can’t easily update the installer drive so that it installs the latest version. If you want to create a bootable drive that installs the latest version of 10.13 or 10.12 directly, you’ll need to a download the latest version of the High Sierra or Sierra installer from the Mac App Store, and then repeat the procedure below using that installer app.]

I’ve long recommended creating a bootable installer drive—on an external hard drive, thumb drive, or USB stick—for the version of macOS you’re running on your Mac.1 It’s great for installing the OS on multiple Macs, because you don’t have to download the ~5GB installer onto each computer, and it serves as a handy emergency disk if your Mac is experiencing problems. 2 Here’s this year’s version, for both macOS High Sierra (10.13) and macOS Sierra (10.12), of my annual how-to guide.

How do I get the High Sierra or Sierra installer?

You can get the latest version of the High Sierra or Sierra installer from the Mac App store. (Developers can get the current release version of High Sierra through the developer download site—scroll down to “Release Software.”)

What you need

To create a bootable High Sierra or Sierra installer drive, you just need the appropriate aforementioned installer and a Mac-formatted drive (a hard drive, solid-state drive [SSD], thumb drive, or USB stick) that’s big enough to hold the installer and all its data—an 8GB thumb drive is perfect.

The installer drive must be formatted as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume with a GUID Partition Table. Macworld has a nice tutorial that explains how to properly format the drive.

Your macOS user account must also have administrator privileges.

Important: When you download the High Sierra or Sierra installer from the Mac App Store, it will be saved to your main Applications folder (/Applications); it must be in that location for the procedure below to work. However, if you run the installer—say, to install the OS—from that location, the installer will delete itself after installation finishes. So if you plan to run the installer before making your bootable installer drive, first make a copy of the Installer in another folder or on another drive so you have a safe copy; before creating the bootable installer, move the copy back to the Applications folder. (If you’ve read this paragraph too late, and the installer has already deleted itself after an installation, you just need to re-download High Sierra r Sierra from the Mac App Store—via the Purchases tab—before you can make your bootable installer drive.)

The easiest way is createinstallmedia

Starting with Mavericks, hidden inside the OS X installer is a Unix program called createinstallmedia, provided by Apple specifically for creating a bootable installer drive. Using it requires the use of Terminal, but it works well, it’s official, and the procedure is easy enough: If you can copy and paste, you can do it.3

The only real drawback to createinstallmedia is that it doesn’t work under OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard—it requires OS X 10.7 Lion or later. But I suspect that the vast (vast) majority of people installing macOS 10.13 High Sierra or 10.12 Sierra will have access to a Mac running 10.7 or later.

Using createinstallmedia in Terminal to create a Sierra installer drive.

The steps

Connect to your Mac a properly formatted 8GB (or larger) drive, and rename the drive Untitled. (The Terminal command I provide here assumes that the drive is named Untitled.) Also, make sure that the High Sierra or Sierra installer (or at least a copy of it), called Install macOS High Sierra.app or Install macOS Sierra.app, respectively, is in its default location in your main Applications folder (/Applications).

Select the text of the appropriate Terminal command below, and copy it:

Warning: This step will erase the destination drive or partition, so make sure that it doesn’t contain any valuable data. Paste the copied command into Terminal, making sure that no double dashes (--) were replaced by em dashes (—); press Return.

The Terminal window displays createinstallmedia’s progress as a textual representation of a progress bar: Erasing Disk: 0%… 10 percent…20 percent… and so on. You also see a list of the program’s tasks as they occur: Copying installer files to disk…Copy complete.Making disk bootable…Copying boot files…Copy complete. On a recent Mac with a fast destination drive, the procedure shouldn’t take longer than 5 minutes, though it can take as long as 20 or 30 minutes on an older Mac or with a very slow drive. The process is finished once you see Copy Complete. Done., as shown in the screenshot above. If you like, you can then rename the drive (in the Finder) from its default name of Install macOS Sierra Developer Beta or Install macOS Sierra Public Beta.

Booting from the installer drive

You can boot any High Sierra- or Sierra-compatible Mac from your new installer drive. First, connect the drive to your Mac. Then, if your Mac is already booted into macOS, choose the install drive in the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences and restart; or, if your Mac is currently shut down, hold down the Option key at startup and choose the install drive when macOS’s Startup Manager appears.

Once booted from your installer drive, you can perform any of the tasks available from the macOS installer’s special recovery and restore features. In fact, you’ll see the same macOS Utilities screen you get when you boot into macOS Recovery—but unlike with recovery mode, your bootable installer includes the entire installer.

When I was at Macworld, my most popular article each year was my annual bootable-installer tutorial. Each still remains at or near the top of Google results for “bootable installer,” including the one I did for OS X 10.11 El Capitan. ↩

I think it’s a better emergency disk than macOS Recovery, because a bootable installer drive includes the full macOS installer, whereas macOS Recovery requires you to download ~5GB of installer data if you ever need to reinstall the OS. (And don’t forget that not all Macs have macOS Recovery.) ↩

In some of my older Macworld articles on creating a bootable installer drive, I provided three or four different ways to perform the procedure, partly because some procedures didn’t work on some versions of OS X, and partly to allow Terminal-averse people to use graphical-interface apps. But the Terminal method will work for the vast majority of people these days, and while Terminal’s textual interface can be intimidating, in this particular case there are actually fewer opportunities to make an error. ↩

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about OS X user accounts. The first time was likely a 2002 Macworld article (no longer available online) explaining how to move your user folder to a different drive; more recently, I did a tutorial on changing your short username. I was also one of the people behind the ChangeShortName utility. But until recently, one thing I’d never tried to do, let alone written about, was duplicate an existing user account. It’s just not that common of a task.

You know where this is going.

For years, our kids have shared a single account (“Kids Account”) on the family Mac. That account had parental controls enabled, and it was configured for really young kids who did little beyond using a few apps aimed at preschoolers and kinders.

This setup worked pretty well until the past year or so. Now that the kids are getting older (both are in elementary school), each wants to use apps with her own settings. They both also use the same online-homework system, so sharing an account means lots of logging in and out of accounts in Safari. And, of course, each wants a different desktop picture, a different account name and photo, and so on.

Given all this, I decided that it was time for each child to have her own account. But I didn’t want to manually create two new accounts, as the current kid account was already set up mostly the way we wanted it for each kid: with the right parental controls, with the desired apps in the Dock, with the necessary Safari bookmarks and keychain-saved passwords, and so on. No, what I wanted to do was duplicate the existing kid account.1 And just to be safe, I wanted to duplicate it twice, creating a copy for each kid while letting me save the original account until I could be sure everything was working properly.

Time Machine (or clone backup) to the rescue

Unfortunately, OS X doesn’t provide a simple way to duplicate an existing user account. I’ve come across complicated procedures requiring shell commands in Terminal and/or serious account-administration tools, but most people would take one look at these procedures and decide that, well, creating new accounts and reconfiguring them doesn’t look so bad after all.

However, it turns out there’s a much easier way, if you think creatively. It just requires an up-to-date Time Machine backup (or clone backup) of your Mac.

Migration Assistant prompts you to give the “new” account a unique name.

Here’s the procedure:

Quit all your open apps, saving any unsaved documents. (If you don’t do this now, you’ll be forced to do it later.)

Force Time Machine to do a backup so that your backup is up to date. You can do this by clicking the Time Machine menu in the menu bar—it looks like a clock with a circular arrow around it—and choosing Back Up Now. (If you don’t see the Time Machine menu, open the Time Machine pane of System Preferences and enable the Show Time Machine In Menu Bar option.) If you’re using a clone backup tool such as SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner, update your clone-backup drive so that it reflects the current state of your Mac’s drive.

Open the Migration Assistant utility, located in /Applications/Utilities.

Click Continue, and enter the username and password of an administrator account. Your Mac will restart into the Migration Assistant interface.

When Migration Assistant appears, choose From A Mac, Time Machine Backup, Or Startup Disk, and then click Continue.

On the resulting Transfer Information To This Mac screen, select your Time Machine backup drive (or clone-backup drive), and then click Continue.

For a clone-backup drive, proceed to Step 8. For a Time Machine drive, you’ll see a list of eligible backups. Choose the correct one, and then click Continue. (Unless you’re using the Time Machine drive for multiple Macs, you should see only one choice here.)

On the Select The Information To Transfer screen, unselect everything except the account you want to duplicate. In my case, this was Kids Account. (You’ll see a message next to the account stating, “This user needs attention before Migrating.” The message is there because the account has the same name as an existing account—you’ll fix that in a moment.) Click Continue.

You then see a dialog box informing you that the account you’ve chosen already exists, and giving you a couple options for resolving the issue. Choose Keep Both User Accounts, and then give the new, duplicate account a full name and an account name that differ from the originals. Click Continue.

If FileVault is enabled on your Mac, you’ll be prompted to authorize the account migration. You’ll then be asked if you want the new account to be able to unlock FileVault. If FileVault isn’t enabled on your Mac, you won’t see these screens.

You then see the Transferring Your Information screen as Migration Assistant imports the chosen account as a new account.

Once you see the Migration Complete screen, click Quit, and you’ll be taken to the standard login screen. The new account is available for use.

If, like me, you want to create two new accounts based on the original account, you’ll want to repeat the process.

I did this twice, so my Mac now has two new kid accounts, along with the original (which, again, I plan to keep around only until I’m confident that everything is working as expected with the new accounts). Both of the new kid accounts work exactly like the original, except that each kid can customize to her heart’s content without upsetting her sibling. And it’s now easier for each to do her homework.

Of course, I did have to do a wee bit of cleanup. For example, I needed to go into the Passwords pane of Safari preferences in each account and delete the other child’s homework-website passwords. I also decided to set each kid up with a separate iCloud account, so each now has her own calendar and FaceTime address. I disabled iCloud email, though—we still use Tocomail for the kids, as it has better tools for parental monitoring and address whitelisting, as well as a simpler, child-friendly interface.

You can actually copy Parental Controls settings from one account and apply them to another, but that doesn’t help with app settings, system settings, or anything else beyond what’s managed using Parental Controls. ↩

As I mentioned last week, I email myself frequently with URLs of articles I want to read on a different device; links to products I want to research later; and general “notes to self” where the email message acts as a handy reminder in my Inbox. Similarly, there are a couple people—my wife, for one—whom I email frequently.

Given how many times I send email to these addresses, it’s a bit of a pain to manually type them over and over and over. An alternative is to enter a nickname in a person’s record in the Contacts app; you can then use that nickname as a quick shortcut when addressing email messages. For example, if my friend’s name is Jake, I can enter JJ as his nickname in Contacts, and then just type JJ in iOS (or OS X) Mail to send a message to him. However, if the person has multiple email addresses, I must still manually choose, from a list, which address to send to. Similarly, if any other contacts have the nickname text anywhere in his or her contact record (say, JJ’s Roof and Fence Repair), those people will also appear in the list.

The text-shortcuts screen in Settings

The solution I’ve chosen is to use iOS’s keyboard-shortcuts feature (located in Settings -> General -> Keyboards -> Shortcuts) to create unique shortcuts for my favorite contacts. (There are already a bunch of shortcuts in there; you may discover some that are quite useful.) If you tap the plus-sign (+) button, you can configure a new custom shortcut that, when typed, inserts the text you specify.1 You just need to make sure that your new shortcuts are unique, so iOS doesn’t get confused trying to figure out which text to insert.

The trick, for this particular use case, is to create shortcuts that are both unique and easy to type when addressing an email message. And this is where my favorite part of this tip comes in. The @ character is common to all email addresses, and when addressing an email message in iOS Mail, the @ key is on the main keyboard—you don’t need to switch to the number/symbol keyboard to access it. At the same time, no email address contains multiple @ characters, and none of my contacts have a name or other info containing multiple @ characters. So I’ve created shortcuts that are essentially sequences of the @ character: I’m @@, my wife’s personal address (the one I send to most frequently) is @@@, and another frequent contact is @@@@.

Creating a new text shortcut in iOS

Now, whenever I need to send myself an email message, I just tap @@; to send my wife an email, I tap @@@.

Even better, assuming you’re using the same iCloud account on your iOS devices and your Mac, these shortcuts sync across devices. (In OS X, they’re found in System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Text.) Granted, the shortcuts aren’t quite as necessary in OS X, but I still find them to be really useful.

I could use TextExpander Touch to configure snippets for my most-frequent recipients, but given how kludgy iOS 8 is when it comes to switching to and from third-party keyboards, I end up using TextExpander mainly when I need to paste longer snippets or when I’m typing text with a bunch of snippets. ↩

Yes, I know that Yosemite is the newer OS, but I feel like I’m just hitting my stride with iOS 8. After a month or so with Apple’s latest mobile OS, I’ve made it past proficiency and I’m embracing the little things—and I’m figuring out which of the hyped features I’m actually using day to day.

Here are some of my favorite iOS 8 features, in no particular order, with an emphasis on things that haven’t been exhaustively covered elsewhere.1 I hope you discover something new and useful.

[Updated 11/4/2014, 9:45a PT, to add a tip about .zip files in Mail. Updated 11/6/2014, 7:40p PT, to add a step to the screen-brightness tip confirming that Zoom Region is set to Full Screen Zoom.]

Minimize in-progress email How many times have you been composing an email message on your iPhone or iPad and wished you could browse another message for some info? It happens to me all the time. There’s now a way to do so: Just swipe the in-progress message’s title bar down to the bottom of the screen, and there it stays until you tap it again. While the message is minimized, you can browse messages, mailboxes, and accounts; and you can compose new messages and replies—you can even minimize multiple messages and get back to each later. (When multiple messages are minimized, tapping the bottom of the screen lets you choose which minimized message to edit, as shown in the image here.)

Notifications for Mail threads One of my favorite Mail features introduced in iOS 6 was the VIP view: Any Inbox messages from people you designate as VIPs are shown here, and you can set up a special notification sound for new VIP messages. (Trivia: On my iPhone, that sound has long been the Macintosh II startup chime.)

In iOS 8, you can now designate specific email threads as “very important”: When viewing any message in the thread, tap the flag button at the bottom of the screen, then tap Notify Me, and then Notify Me again. Messages in that thread will display a small alarm-bell icon, and whenever a new reply to that thread arrives, you get a notification. (Trivia: My thread-notification sound is the startup chime for the Macintosh LC.) Tap the flag button again and tap Stop Notifying to turn off notifications for the thread.

Automatic zip-archive expansion For years, receiving a message with a zip-archive attachment meant waiting until you could get back to your “real” computer to expand the archive and view its contents. iOS Mail didn’t know what to do with .zip files, and iOS had no native app for handling them. (You could install a third-party app for dealing with .zip files, and use the Open With feature to send an archive to it, but few people did.)

Under iOS 8, if you tap on a zip-archive attachment in Mail, you can preview the archive’s contents, just as if the message had separate attachments. You can swipe left or right to browse the files, and you can share any individual file using the standard iOS share sheet. (Thanks to my former Macworld colleague Serenity Caldwell for catching this one.)

More swipe actions When viewing a mailbox’s message list, you can now perform many more actions on a message without having to view it first. Swipe a message preview to the right, and you get the option to mark the message as read/unread. Swipe slightly to the left, and you get buttons to trash the message, flag/unflag it, or More; tapping More displays a list of additional options, including Reply/Reply All, Forward, Flag/Unflag, Mark as Read/Unread, Move to Junk, Move Message, and Notify Me (for enabling the aforementioned per-thread notifications). One complaint I have here is that if you swipe too far to the left, you immediately delete the message—I do this accidentally All. The. Time. (I’ve never been so happy to have the shake-to-undo feature.) In Settings > Mail > Swipe Options, you can choose which swipe direction provides which options.

Easy contact adding I haven’t used this feature much, but the few times I have, it’s been a real convenience: If you receive an email message from someone who’s not in your contacts, and the message has a signature containing the sender’s contact information, Mail will display a small banner at the top of the message with that info; tap Add To Contacts to create a new contact record that includes all the information.

Today & Thread Notifications views Last year, I wrote about iOS 7 Mail’s new special views, and iOS 8 gets a couple more of these views. Tap Edit on Mail’s main Mailboxes screen, and you can enable Today and Thread Notifications views. Today displays all messages in your Inbox received today, while Thread Notifications lists all email threads for which you’ve enabled notifications. I’ve been using the Today view much more than I expected.

Siri: Live dictation, Song ID, Hey Siri

Siri has received a few nice upgrades in iOS 8—the kinds of things that will make Siri even more appealing to those of us who already use it, and might bring more people on board the Siri bandwagon.

Live dictation Perhaps my favorite new Siri trick is live dictation. Siri used to work by listening to you talk, then sending a recording of your dictation to the cloud, then (a few seconds later) returning results. Under iOS 8, Siri shows you its interpretation of your speech on the fly—there’s just an ever-so-short delay for each word.

Not only does this improvement make Siri faster and more responsive, but it means you see immediately if Siri has made a mistake in transcription. Instead of speaking a long text message, for example, and waiting to see if the results are what you intended, you see, as you’re talking, if the message is correct.

Song ID I’m a fan of SoundHound, which uses the iPhone’s microphone to listen to whatever song is playing on the radio, on a friend’s speakers, or during a TV show and then—usually—identifies it. (Yes, I still listen to the radio sometimes.) Under iOS 7, I used SoundHound often enough that I had a SoundHound button on my Launch Center Pro home screen, with SoundHound configured to automatically listen on launch.

Siri can name that tune.

Under iOS 8, I can instead activate Siri and say “What song is playing?” Assuming Siri is working at that particular moment2, a few seconds later my iPhone displays information about the track (along with, of course, a button to buy the track on the iTunes Store). I haven’t used SoundHound in weeks.

My only complaint here is that—as with All Things Siri—there are times when talking to my phone isn’t socially appropriate. I’m still pining for a text-interface option for Siri.

Hey Siri Finally, a feature I didn’t think I’d use much, but I’ve come to like, is the new “Hey Siri” option. Hidden inside Settings > General > Siri, enabling this option lets you activate Siri by saying—wait for it—”Hey Siri” instead of holding down the Home button. The catch is that this works only when the device is connected to a power source (i.e., charging). I initially assumed that this restriction would reduce the usefulness of Hey Siri, but then I realized that the place I’m most likely to use Hey Siri is also the one place my phone is always charging during use: in the car.

OS X iOS AirDrop

If you’re running OS X 10.10 Yosemite on your Macs, you can (finally) use AirDrop, Apple’s super-easy file-transfer feature, between Macs and iOS devices. (It used to be iOS-to-iOS and Mac-to-Mac, but not across platforms.)

When writing about iOS, I’m constantly taking screenshots on my iPhones and iPads, and I need to get those images to my Mac for production. After testing Dropbox, Photo Stream, innumerable specialty photo apps, and more under iOS 7 and earlier, I had settled on simply emailing screenshots to myself. It worked, but it was a pain. With iOS 8, I just tap the Share button in Photos, wait a couple seconds for my Mac to appear in the AirDrop area, and tap the Mac’s icon.

What’s especially nice about this feature is that if your iOS device and your Mac are configured with the same iCloud account, you don’t even need to approve the transfer on your Mac—the files are automatically transferred and saved in your Downloads folder. I suspect this is only a minor improvement for many people, but for me, it’s huge. As I mentioned on Twitter, “universal” AirDrop alone is a compelling argument for upgrading to Yosemite. This is the AirDrop I’ve been waiting for.

Phone/Mac SMS relay, Instant Hotspot, phone handoffs

iOS 8 debuted over a month ago, but two of its best features weren’t available until the release of the iOS 8.1 update. When used with a Mac running Yosemite, your 8.1-running iPhone essentially adds cellular capabilities—specifically, SMS and MMS messages, and cellular Internet—to your Mac. (These features could fall under the “covered everywhere” category, but they’re so much better than I expected them to be that I had to include them here.)

Setting up SMS forwarding requires a code provided by the target device.

SMS relay On the SMS front, if you go to Settings > Messages > Text Message Forwarding, you can enable message forwarding for any or all of your Yosemite Macs (as well as for other iOS devices). Once you do—you’re required to enter a code on your phone; that code is provided by the device to which you’re forwarding—any SMS or MMS messages you’d normally receive on your phone will be relayed to Messages on your Mac (or iPad), and you can send SMS and MMS messages from your Mac (or iPad), as well.

Yes, this means that we’re finally getting closer to the promise of “all my messages on all my devices” that Apple teased back in mid-2011 when iMessage was announced.

Instant Hotspot When Yosemite was previewed earlier this year at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, the iOS 8/Yosemite Instant Hotspot feature didn’t exactly excite me. But in retrospect, that was likely because I’d never had a cellular plan that let me use my phone’s cellular-data connection with my other devices. When I upgraded to the iPhone 6 Plus last month, I finally switched from the legacy “unlimited” data plan for iPhone to one of AT&T’s current Mobile Share plans.

Now that I can do hotspots, I can take advantage of Instant Hotspot, and it’s pretty fantastic. I had to initially set up the hotspot the old fashioned way: Turning on the hotspot in Settings > Personal Hotspot; configuring a password; and then connecting my MacBook Air to the phone’s ad-hoc Wi-Fi network. But after this initial setup, using Instant Hotspot is dead simple: My iPhone-provided network always appears in my MacBook Air’s Wi-Fi menu; when I choose it, my laptop essentially tells the phone, “Hey, I need Internet access!” The phone automatically enables its hotspot, the laptop automatically connects to it, and I’m online. I don’t even need to take my phone out of my pocket or bag. This sort of integration is why people buy Apple. (One minor complaint: I wish I could give the hotspot a custom name—the hotspot feature uses the phone’s name, and I always name my iOS devices with an email address.

Phone “handoffs” The other iPhone-Mac feature I’m really liking is phone handoffs. The best way to explain this feature is with an example: The other day, I was doing some work on my MacBook Air in the kitchen when my wife called. My iPhone was in my office at the other end of the house, but a phone-call notification appeared on my MacBook’s screen; I clicked Accept, and I took the call on my laptop, which acted as a speakerphone.

Similarly, I can initiate calls on my Mac by clicking a phone number in Contacts, or even on a webpage. My phone—wherever it is—does the heavy lifting, and I never have to leave my computer. As long as my Mac and iPhone are on the same network and configured with the same iCloud account, phone handoffs just work. (Unlike Instant Hotspots and SMS relay, phone handoffs require only iOS 8 and Yosemite.)

Requirements Here’s a quick summary of the hardware and communication requirements for these features:

SMS relay requires that your phone and other devices be on the same local network; it also requires iOS 8.1.

Phone handoff to/from other devices requires that both devices be on the same local network.

Settings: Battery usage, notification disabling, visual options

iOS updates always include some neat little changes to settings and options, and iOS 8’s Settings app is no exception.

Per-app battery usage Perhaps my favorite new feature in Settings is a way to see which apps are sucking up your battery’s juice. Go to Settings > General > Usage > Battery Usage, and after a short wait, you see a screen listing recently used apps (with “recent” being your choice of the past 24 hours or the past seven days) along with the percentage of battery usage taken up by each, sorted by that usage.

You can see which apps are using the most juice.

Note that just because an app appears high on this list doesn’t mean it’s a degenerate battery hog. In most cases, it’s simply that you’ve been using the app frequently. For example, I use Reeder and Tweetbot a lot, so they appear at the top for me. Where you’d want to be concerned is if an app appears here that you don’t use frequently.

Also, keep in mind that these percentages refer to each app’s proportion of your actual battery use, not of your battery’s maximum charge. In other words, in the screenshot here, Reeder is responsible for 19 percent of all my battery use over the past seven days. It does not mean that Reeder has used 19 percent of a fully charged battery.

Turning off all notifications for a particular app requires multiple taps to deactivate banners/alerts, turn off app badges, deactivate sounds, and remove from Notification Center and the lock screen. A single option to deactivate all notifications for an app would be much appreciated.

In iOS 8, we finally (yes, I think this one actually deserves a “finally”) have a way to quickly disable notifications for an app. Just go to Settings > Notifications> [App Name] and disable Allow Notifications, and all of that app’s notification options will be turned off. Hallelujah.

You can increase legibility, and decrease transparency, using Accessibility options.

More visual-accessibility options that help everyone In Settings > General > Accessibility, there are now more options for tweaking iOS’s appearance. Ostensibly for those with vision issues, many of these settings can also improve the experience for those with good vision. The new Increase Contrast screen offers three options: Reduce Transparency makes many translucent elements—such as Notification Center and Control Center—much less so, making them easier to use (if, to some people, less attractive). Darken Colors helps to increase overall contrast. And Reduce White Point essentially dims the screen a bit—this one is useful if you find your device’s lowest brightness level to still be too bright at night or in dark environments. (Another one that’s interesting, and that could come in handy in particular situations is Grayscale, which, as you’d expect, converts the screen’s color gamut to grayscale.)

Even dimmer screen dimming This one, also hidden in the Accessibility settings, seems minor, but I love it. I regularly read on my iOS devices at night before going to sleep. If I’m doing that reading in bed, the lights are out (because my better half is trying to sleep), so I turn the screen brightness all the way down. But iOS’s dimmest screen-brightness level has never been dim enough—it’s still uncomfortably bright when there’s no ambient light. (Some reading-focused apps have nice night-reading modes, but not all.)

My solution has long been to go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut and select Invert Colors. Whenever I was in a dark environment, I would triple-press the Home button to invert the device’s screen colors so that white backgrounds are black, and black text is white. The result isn’t ideal—especially if there’s anything but text on the screen—but it works.

This hidden feature lets you dim the screen more than usual.

Under iOS 8.1, you can use this same triple-press shortcut to quickly change the brightness of the screen. Even better, you can reduce brightness much more than with the standard brightness-level slider (the one accessed via Control Center and the Settings app). Here’s how:

Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Zoom.

Enable Zoom.

Tap the screen three times with three fingers. This brings up a zoom-options popover.

Tap Choose Filter, and then tap Low Light. The screen will dim considerably.

Tap outside the popover to dismiss it.

Make sure Zoom Region, a bit lower on that screen, is set to Full Screen Zoom. (It was for me, but some readers report that it wasn’t for them.)

Now, whenever you triple-press the Home button, you’ll toggle this “extra dimming” mode on or off. (If you selected multiple Accessibility Shortcut options, you’ll instead see a popover listing those options; tap one to toggle it.) Note that the brightness level of your “extra dimmed” screen is relative to your screen’s current brightness setting, which means that if you want it really dim, you should use Control Center to reduce brightness to the lowest level, and then triple-press the Home button. The result is a screen that’s much dimmer than you’ve probably seen before, and thus much better for use in the dark.

(Interestingly, this dimmed mode really is a screen filter, rather than a further dimming of the screen. You can see this if you rotate your device 90 degrees—as the screen switches orientations, the filter rotates more slowly than the rest of the screen, revealing the screen’s actual brightness level for a fraction of a second.)

The Home and Lock screens: Tweaks for geeks

The Home and Lock screens may not seem much different than they were under iOS 7, but even they’ve received some useful tweaks in iOS 8. And don’t forget Notification Center and Control Center.

Accurate Control Center brightness previews Whenever Control Center is visible, the rest of the screen is dimmed to give Control Center focus. This makes a lot of sense, but under iOS 7, the behavior made it difficult to choose the correct brightness level: Because the “real” screen, behind Control Center, was dimmed, you’d end up opening Control Center, adjusting brightness, closing Control Center to see the result…and repeating until you got the brightness level you wanted.

Better Control Center brightness previews

One of my favorite minor details of iOS 8 is that whenever you touch the brightness slider in Control Center, the “real” screen behind it is temporarily restored to normal brightness, so you see an accurate preview while you’re adjusting the level.

Keyboard input ignored when accessing Control Center Another little Control Center touch—no pun intended—I like is that if you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to access Control Center while an onscreen keyboard is visible, any keyboard input is ignored. In iOS 7, I’d frequently “type” characters while trying to show Control Center; this happens far less frequently now.

Landscape-orientation folders If you’ve got an iPhone 6 Plus, you’ve likely noticed that some apps give you an iPad-like layout—a sidebar of some sort on the left, with content on the right—in landscape orientation. In most apps, I find this new layout to be largely useless, as the aspect ratio of the 6 Plus’s screen means you don’t get much height when in landscape orientation—it’s usually more useful to just use the full width of the screen for content.

But a landscape-orientation feature I do like on the Plus is that, in addition to the Home screen rotating, as it does on the iPad, you get a view of folders that’s currently available only on the 6 Plus. Specifically, when a folder has more than nine items in it, you can see multiple “screens” within that folder simultaneously.

Landscape mode on the iPhone 6 Plus gives you a new view of folders.

On the other hand, this feature reminds me of one of my least favorite landscape-orientation-Home-screen behaviors: When you rotate your iPad or iPhone 6 Plus into landscape orientation, the Home screen rotates, but every icon moves. And because iOS-device screens are rectangular, every icon except for a few in the top row changes its relative position, as well. For example, in portrait orientation on my 6 Plus, the music icon is the first icon in the third row; in landscape, it’s the third icon on the second row. I’ve disliked this behavior since the original iPad. (Interestingly, on the 6 Plus—but not on any iPad—the dock always stays along the short edge of the screen, with each icon in the same relative location.)

Medical ID For years, I’ve created a custom lock screen, complete with emergency-contact info, for each of my iOS devices. I’ve included phone numbers, email addresses, my blood type, and medication allergies, along with a note offering a reward for returning the phone.

In iOS 8, if you open the Health app and tap the Medical ID button at the bottom of the screen, you can create an official “Medical ID” screen with important info: name, date of birth, allergies, medications, blood type, organ-donor status, height, weight, multiple emergency contacts, and medical notes. (I use this last field to include a “Reward if returned” note that includes my email address.) Once created, this screen is accessible from the lock screen, so someone who finds your phone or—worst-case scenario—you can quickly see all this info, whether it’s to return your device to you or to provide emergency care.

(FYI, I still create a custom lock screen, but now it includes a note that reads, “Swipe right & tap Emergency > Medical ID for reward/contact info.” I’m assuming that, until this feature has been around for a while, most people who find my phone aren’t going to realize that the Medical ID screen even exists.)

You can reply directly to some notifications.

Interactive notifications In iOS 7 and prior, whenever you received a notification, you’d have to open the source app—unlocking your device first, if necessary—to act. I love the fact that in iOS 8, I can reply to many message-based notifications (Mail, Messages, Tweetbot, and more) right from the notification itself. Just swipe to the left and tap Reply, and you can immediately type a message. This even works on the lock screen, though for some apps, you’ll still need to unlock your phone to type the reply.

Speaking of notifications, I also like that you can remove individual notifications by left-swiping, leaving other notifications from the same app in place. And you can delete email messages, or mark them as read, right from Notification Center. (You can even process Notification banners as they appear. For example, pull down on the bottom of a Mail banner, and you get options to Mark As Read or Trash.) On the other hand, you still can’t easily clear out Notification Center completely. You must remove one app’s notifications, then another’s, and so on, tapping a tiny X button, then a tiny Clear button for each.

Safari: Force desktop view, new tab view, and more

Safari hasn’t gotten a massive overhaul in iOS 8, but it’s gained a few neat features.

Show desktop version of site One of my biggest frustrations with mobile browsers is that many websites insist on serving phones (and sometimes tablets) oversimplified mobile versions of webpages. This is especially frustrating when the mobile sites are missing features or options available on the desktop versions.

In iOS 8 Safari, when you get stuck with the mobile version of a website, tap the URL field and then swipe down on the webpage, and a couple new hidden options are revealed: Add To Favorites and Request Desktop Site. Tap the latter to reload the desktop version of the current page. (Unfortunately, these options sit on a translucent background that makes them nearly invisible on some sites.)

You can request the desktop version of mobile websites.

New tab view on iPad If you tap the little tab-view button in iPad Safari’s toolbar (it looks like two squares stacked on top of each other), you get a nice overview of all open webpages, with pages from the same website stacked together, Tap any page to view it. I find this new view to be much more usable than the one in iOS 7—enough so that I’ve disable the tab bar to gain some additional vertical space for webpage content.

Per-site searching Go to Settings > Safari > Quick Website Search and enable Quick Website Search, and you can add quick-search shortcuts for most sites by simply visiting the site once. For example, after browsing Amazon.com, you’ll notice that the Quick Website Search list now includes amazon.com as a Website Shortcut. Going forward, you can search Amazon by simply typing amazon [search term] in Safari’s URL/search bar.

Per-tab Private Browsing This is a simple, but welcome, change: You can now enable Private Browsing for a particular tab, leaving all other tabs “public.” (Under iOS 7, Private Browsing was an all-or-nothing feature: Enabling it closed all tabs and started you with a blank, private slate.)

Scan your card for online purchases iCloud Keychain makes it easy to quickly enter previously used credit cards when making online purchases, but what if you’re using a new card for the first time? In iOS 8 Safari, when you tap in a credit-card-number field, you see a new Scan Credit Card option. Tap it, and you can then use your iOS device’s camera to “scan” your credit card’s number. It can even scan the card’s expiration date. (This scanning feature is also available when adding credit cards to Apple Pay.)

Messages: Soundbites, per-conversation Do Not Disturb

Unlike on OS X, Messages on iOS has always been pretty reliable for me. But it’s also had far fewer features. In iOS 8, Apple has brought iOS messages a bit closer to the desktop version.

Soundbites If you’ve followed Apple’s iOS and Yosemite PR at all, you’ve likely seen the company’s demonstrations of Soundbites, a new Messages feature that lets you quickly send an audio message to someone—and lets the recipient listen to that message even more easily. When viewing a conversation screen, just tap and hold the little recording icon, and then talk. When you’re done, slide your finger to the up-arrow button and release, and the message is sent. The recipient can listen to the message by simply raising their iPhone to their ear; they can even reply the same way. Soundbites works really well, and while I often text because I don’t want to talk, sometimes quickly speaking a message is a whole lot more convenient than tapping it out.

You can mute individual conversations in Messages.

Conversation options My favorite new Messages feature is the capability to set Do Not Disturb mode for individual conversations (message threads): Just tap the Details button within a conversation, and then enable Do Not Disturb. It really comes in handy when I need to leave notifications enabled, but a particular texting session between family members or friends gets out of hand. (On that same screen are a few other useful new options: One lets you leave a group conversation entirely—think of it as a passive-aggressive way to say, “Folks, it’s been fun, but you’re driving me nuts.” Another lets you quickly send your current location to other people in the conversation, and a third lets you rename group conversations for easier future reference.)

Camera & Photos: Manual exposure, 60 fps, Camera Roll

Each year, the biggest camera improvements usually come in the form of hardware upgrades on the latest iPhone and iPad models. But the Camera and Photos apps usually get a few tweaks, as well.

The Camera app now lets you manually set the exposure level.

Manual exposure control When taking a photo with an iPhone or iPad, you can tap anywhere on the screen to force the camera to focus on that point. But under iOS 8, the resulting focus-indicator square sports a brightness icon—drag it up or down to manually adjust the shot’s exposure level. You even see a live preview of how adjusting the level will affect the resulting image.

60 fps iOS 7 introduced the capability—as long as you had an iPhone 5s—to record video at 120 frames per second (fps). The main reason to do so is that you can later slow down parts of that video to 30fps and get great slow-motion video. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus up that capture rate to a whopping 240 fps, making slo-mo videos even better. The downside to taking slo-mo video is that, because it’s capturing four to eight times as many frames per second, it eats up a lot more of your phone’s precious flash storage.

What many people don’t realize is that if you go to Settings > Photos & Camera, and scroll down near the bottom of that screen, you can enable Record Video At 60 FPS to record standard video (in other words, using the Camera app’s Video mode, rather than Slo-Mo mode) at 60fps. You can’t use these clips with iOS’s slow-motion feature, but you get standard videos that have twice the frame rate as normal, but require half to a quarter of the storage space of slo-mo videos.

Welcome back, Camera Roll A minor, but welcome, improvement in iOS 8.1 is the return of iOS 7’s Camera Roll, replacing the (apparently unpopular) Recently Added album of 8.0 through 8.0.2.

Find My iPhone: Send Last Location

I’ve long been a fan of Apple’s Find My iPhone service, which lets you find a lost—or stolen—iOS device. But if your device’s battery dies before you can locate it—or before you even realize it’s gone—you’re out of luck. Under iOS 8, go to Settings > iCloud > Find My iPhone (or iPad or iPod touch), and enable Send Last Location. Now, whenever your device’s battery gets “critically low,” the device will—assuming it has an Internet connection—automatically send its location to the Find My iPhone servers. When that battery dies, you’ll no longer be able to track the device location in real time, but you’ll at least know its last location.

Peer-to-Peer AirPlay

One of the best reasons to get an Apple TV is AirPlay, which (among other things) lets you easily mirror your iOS device’s screen on a TV or video projector. But before iOS 8, your Apple TV and iOS device needed to be on the same local network to make an AirPlay connection. This made it difficult to, for example, use an Apple TV and AirPlay in a hotel room or at a conference. And if the Wi-Fi network is crowded, AirPlay mirroring’s performance can suffer.

With iOS 8 (and Apple TV software 7.0 or later), your devices no longer need to be on the same network—or on any network at all. Each simply needs to have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled. Assuming they do, your Apple TV should show up in your iOS device’s list of AirPlay destinations (in Control Center). When you choose it, the Apple TV will automatically set up an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network, and your iOS device will join that network, allowing you to use AirPlay directly. In addition to being easy to set up, peer-to-peer AirPlay will often provide better performance, because no other devices will be sharing the network.

Easy video screen capture

Taking a screenshot of your iOS device’s screen is simple: Just press the Home and Sleep/Wake buttons simultaneously. But if, like me, you need to capture video of your iOS device’s screen, the procedure is a bit more involved. Under iOS 7 and earlier, it required you to install a third-party app, such as Reflector, on your Mac, and then mirror your iPhone or iPad screen to your Mac using AirPlay.

In QuickTime Player, choose New > New Movie Recording (not New Screen Recording).

In the resulting movie-recording window, click the tiny downward-pointing arrow next to the red record button.

Choose your iOS device under Camera.

Open that menu again to choose your audio source. (To record your iOS device’s audio, choose it; to record a voiceover, choose your Mac’s microphone.)

Choose High or Maximum recording quality.

Click the red record button to begin recording; click the button again to end recording.

The result is a QuickTime movie of whatever you did on your iOS device’s screen. A nice touch is that QuickTime Player automatically tweaks the status bar in your recording to show a full battery and a solid Wi-Fi signal, to remove your cellular carrier’s logo, and more.

Maps: 3D Flyover Tours

You can tour some cities without leaving your couch.

Want to take a tour of London, or Paris, or San Francisco? Launch the Maps app and search for the city; at the top of the screen, you’ll see the text “3D Flyover Tour of City.” Tap Start, and you’ll see an impressive flyover tour, with prominent landmarks labeled as you “fly over” them.

Alas, the list of cities for which Apple offers these tours is currently short, but for those cities, it’s a fun diversion.

Third-party apps: Auto-fill passwords

I’m a huge fan of 1Password for iOS for storing and retrieving my myriad logins and passwords, but Apple’s iCloud Keychain has been dutifully, automatically saving my online passwords, as well. In fact, under iOS 7 I ended up using iCloud Keychain more than I expected, because it worked directly in Safari, while 1Password required me to perform a few extra steps to retrieve website passwords.

Thanks to iOS 8’s extensions feature, 1Password can finally work directly in my browser, so I’m using it constantly. But iOS 8 also brings another advantage to iCloud Keychain: It can now work within apps. If I download an iOS app that’s associated with a website where I already have an account, the developer of that app can enable iCloud Keychain support, so I can quickly log in to the app using my website credentials. +1 for convenience.

I’m not covering app Handoff, third-party keyboards, app extensions, and third-party TouchID. Those are great features that I use many times each day, but they’ve been covered to death. ↩

In truth, Siri is impressively reliable here in the SF Bay Area. But I still have painful memories from Siri’s first year or so. ↩

[3/7/2017 update: Just a reminder that Apple has released a good number of major updates to OS X 10.10 Yosemite since its initial release. Unfortunately, if you created an installer drive with an older version of the Yosemite installer, you can’t easily update the installer drive so that it installs the latest version of Yosemite. If you want to create a bootable drive that installs the latest version of 10.10 directly, you’ll need to download the latest version of the Yosemite installer from the Mac App Store, and then repeat the procedure below using that newer installer app.]

I’ve long recommended creating a bootable installer drive—on an external hard drive or a thumb drive (USB stick)—for the version of OS X you’re running on your Mac.1 It’s great for installing the OS on multiple Macs, because you don’t have to download the 5+ GB installer onto each computer. It also serves as a handy emergency disk if your Mac is experiencing problems. In fact, I think it’s a better emergency disk than OS X Recovery, because a bootable installer drive includes the full OS X installer, whereas OS X Recovery requires you to download 5+ GB of installer data if you ever need to reinstall the OS. (And don’t forget that not all Macs have OS X Recovery.)

What you need

Creating a bootable Yosemite installer drive is actually pretty easy. You just need the Yosemite installer, which you download from the Mac App Store, and a Mac-formatted drive (a hard drive, solid-state drive [SSD], thumb drive, or USB stick) that’s big enough to hold the installer and all its data. An 8GB thumb drive is perfect. Your OS X user account must also have administrator privileges.

Your drive must be formatted as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume with a GUID Partition Table. Macworld has a nice tutorial that explains how to properly format the drive.

One other important thing: After downloading the Yosemite installer, but before installing the new OS, you should either move the downloaded installer out of your Applications folder (which is where the Mac App Store puts it), or make a copy of it in another folder or on another drive. The reason is that when you install Yosemite, the installer deletes itself after installation finishes. If you don’t move or copy the installer elsewhere, you’ll need to re-download it to make your bootable installer drive.

The best option: createinstallmedia

In my older Macworld articles on creating a bootable installer drive, I provided three, or even four, different ways to perform the procedure. This time around, I’m sticking with a single method: using OS X’s own createinstallmedia tool.

Starting with Mavericks, hidden inside the OS X installer is a Unix program called createinstallmedia, provided by Apple specifically for creating a bootable installer drive. Using it does require the use of Terminal, but it works well, it’s official, and the procedure is easy enough: If you can copy and paste, you can do it.

The only real drawback to createinstallmedia is that it doesn’t work under OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard—it requires OS X 10.7 Lion or later. But I suspect that the vast (vast) majority of people installing Yosemite will have access to a Mac running 10.7 or later.

The steps

Connect to your Mac a properly formatted 8GB (or larger) drive, and rename the drive Untitled. (The Terminal command I provide here assumes that the drive is named Untitled.) Also, make sure the Yosemite installer (or at least a copy of it), called Install OS X Yosemite.app, is in its default location in your main Applications folder (/Applications).

The Terminal window displays createinstallmedia’s progress as a textual representation of a progress bar: Erasing Disk: 0%… 10 percent…20 percent… and so on. You also see a list of the program’s tasks as they occur: Copying installer files to disk…Copy complete.Making disk bootable…Copying boot files…Copy complete. The procedure can take as long as 20 or 30 minutes, depending on how fast your Mac can copy data to your destination drive. The process is finished once you see Copy Complete. Done., as shown in the screenshot above. If you like, you can then rename the drive (in the Finder) from its default name of Install OS X Yosemite.

Booting from the installer drive

You can boot any Yosemite-compatible Mac from your new installer drive. First, connect the drive to your Mac. Then, if your Mac is already booted into OS X, choose the install drive in the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences and restart; or, if your Mac is currently shut down, hold down the Option key at startup and choose the install drive when OS X’s Startup Manager appears.

Once booted from your installer drive, you can perform any of the tasks available from the OS X installer’s special recovery and restore features. In fact, you’ll see the same OS X Utilities screen you get when you boot into OS X Recovery—but unlike with recovery mode, your bootable installer includes the entire installer.